If there is one thing to be said about the AJC food staff, love or hate them, it is that they are professionally trained, know how to write and can write. Sometimes they write beautifully, the kind of prose you want to read over and over. It sure would be nice if there were a search tool that allowed access to, oh, all articles by Meredith Ford from 2005 inclusive. You know, a nice text field were you could say something like “author=Meredith Ford, year= 2005, subject=food” and go for it. Instead we’re faced with the interface of Access Atlanta.
Access Atlanta is more a dream for advertisers than readers. The interface is cramped, the interface is slow. The whole site acts as if was never seriously tested with the target audience that would try to use it most. More so, Access Atlanta doesn’t seem to be able to keep food articles that were once there. The hundreds of broken Access Atlanta links around the internet are proof of that. The number of lost articles that can’t be recovered, even by searching on the site, is proof of that.
Access Atlanta is the La Brea tar pit of food articles; articles check in, and soon are lost forever. Contrast that state of affairs with the New York Times, where it’s not all that hard to use a web search and find an article dating to the 19th century. It’s a waste of the AJC’s greatest culinary resource, its long history of excellent food writing over the years. It’s a crime to the authors of the work, it’s a crime perpetrated on readers like me.
January 23, 2010 at 12:45 am
I was invited to host AccessATL’s links on my blog. I am familiar and use sites like Adsense etc regularly. I have advertised my sites on them and been a publisher of ads. I could NOT figure out the A.A. links at all. It was such confusion, I just didn’t have the time to cope with it and told them I was sorry I couldn’t work with them. It could have been an opportunity to earn money, and nice promotion. I hope they can get it better organized. Sounds like the base of the site needs work too. Seems like they over-complicate a bit. People like simple as they can get it.
January 23, 2010 at 5:33 pm
The deal with something like Access Atlanta, which was an attempt to be a portal to all the entertainment possibilities in Atlanta, is that its natural online competition isn’t Creative Loafing, really, but the online search sites like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (Bing).
I can’t prove it, but I suspect that after finding that search sites and aggregation sites (like Urbanspoon) were more deftly organizing their own data than AA was, they redesigned in some disastrous way.
And whatever happened (and yes something happened) Cox Communications and the AJC aren’t saying.
FnS